The present invention relates to electronic means for music generation and more particularly has as its object the provision of such instrument with a sound engine comprising an architecture enabling the application of thousands of stored units of music digital data to rapid production of analog speaker-driving forms, utilizing practical solid state circuit means.
The invention is described below with reference to electronic piano usage, but is also usable in a number of other electronic musical instrument roles to provide, singly or combined, the sounds of a variety of instrument, elements of human voice and other sound sources and in analogous instrument contexts not involving music or voice, but involving comparably varying waveform data.
Multiple Partial (Fourier) Synthesis is a technique well known in engineering practice. Any arbitrary periodic waveform (e.g., musical instruments' sound) may be reproduced by summing up a series of sine waves of appropriately determined frequencies, amplitudes, and relative phases. This technique allows great flexibility, much more so than subtractive synthesis (which starts out with a complex waveform and filters out unwanted spectral content) or wave-table synthesis (which can only reproduce whatever is in the table).
It is the object of the present invention to establish effective instrumentation using Fourier synthesis.